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A Town of Love and Hope
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Wikipedia article
{{Infobox film
| name = A Town of Love and Hope
| native_name =
| image =
| caption =
| director = Nagisa shima
| producer = Tomio Ikeda
| writer = Nagisa shima
| starring =
| music = Riichir Manabe
| cinematography = Hiroshi Kusuda
| editing = Yoshi Sugihara
| studio = Shochiku
| distributor = Shochiku
| released =
| runtime = 62 minutes
| country = Japan
| language = Japanese
}}
'A Town of Love and Hope' , also titled 'Street of Love and Hope', is a 1959 Japanese drama film written and directed by Nagisa shima. It was shima's feature film debut.
Plot
Masao lives with his mother, who works as a shoe polisher, and his sister in a poverty-stricken era of Tokyo. He earns extra money for the family by repeatedly selling his sister's pigeons to passersby in the city, knowing the pigeons will escape their new owners and return home after a few days. The latest buyer, upper-class girl Kyko, unites with Masao's teacher Miss Akiyama in an act of sympathy to help Masao get a job in the company of Kyko's father Kuhara. Kuhara first declines, but Kyko's brother Yuji, who has developed an interest in Miss Akiyama, tries to talk him into giving Masao a chance. Yet, when Kyko and Miss Akiyama find out that Masao's fraud was not a single but a repeated one, both turn away from him in disappointment. Breaking all ties in a final vengeful act, Kyko once again purchases a pigeon from Masao and has her brother shoot it with his rifle.
Cast
* Hiroshi Fujikawa as Masao
* Yuki Tominaga as Kyko
* Kakuko Chino as Miss Akiyama, Masao's teacher
* Yko Mochizuki as Kuniko, Masao's mother
* Fumio Watanabe as Yuji, Kyko's brother
* Fujio Suga as Kuhara, Kyko's father
* Michiko Ito as Yasue, Masao's sister
* Noboru Sakashita as Taiz
* Toyoko Ury as Isako
Production
Due to the "new wave policy" of Shochiku studio's head Shir Kido, designed to promote fresh and free films, shima was given the opportunity to write and direct his first feature film with the production title 'The Boy Who Sold His Pigeon'. Kido, unsatisfied with the result and calling it a "tendency picture", only gave it limited distribution under the title 'A Town of Love and Hope'. Still, reviews for the film were positive. More recent reviewers have pointed out the difference of 'A Town of Love and Hope' both to other Japanese filmmakers of its era and Italian neorealism lying in its refusal to inject humanism or humanist sentiment into its portrayal of class opposition.
References
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